The original “Five Nights at Freddy’s” game has a simple premise: How long can you survive being stalked by murderous animatronics? While the series has grown into a sprawling juggernaut, with a massive fan following fueled by theories and increasingly complex plots, the new film should’ve been a simple, tense and creepy “gateway horror” for younger viewers.
However, outside of devoted franchise fans and younger viewers, the film has proven to be a colossal miss.
The movie follows Mike Schmidt (Josh Hutcherson) as he struggles with the trauma of his younger brother’s kidnapping. After a mistake leads him to get fired from his job at the mall, a career counselor (Matthew Lillard) offers him a job at an abandoned Chuck E. Cheese-like restaurant, that shut down after five kids went missing. In addition, he is trying to keep custody of his younger sister Abby (Piper Rubio). He soon discovers that the animatronics are possessed by murdered children, who want to kill Abby and make her an animatronic like them.
The plot’s combination of the original lore with new ideas and characters turns what should have been a simple, tense film into a film weighed down by a backstory of trauma and custody struggles that never lands. Frustratingly, there were multiple opportunities to set up a scene like the original gameplay, with establishing shots of the camera feeds or mentions of the failing power.
The characters of the film are largely one-note, but there are a few standouts. The main character of Mike Schmidt is relatively flat, though Hutcherson does the best with the limited material he’s given. His younger sister Abby is a great character, as the young Rubio perfectly portrays her haunted and withdrawn demeanor. The character of Aunt Jane (Mary Stuart Masterson), who wants custody of Abby, is so cartoonishly evil and one-dimensional that she is instantly forgettable. And while it’s presented as a plot twist, Matthew Lillard’s casting as the serial killer William Afton was announced early on. His performance was one of the few bright spots of the film, as he plays the villain with scenery-chewing glee that echoes his second-most famous role as Ghostface in the original Scream.
For what’s marketed as a horror film, the scares are few and formulaic and there is only one legitimately suspenseful scene. The opening sequence, where Mike’s predecessor tries and fails to flee an animatronic who stalks him, sets a bar that the rest of the movie never comes close to hitting.
The kills, while possibly creative, were limited to shadows and mild sprays of blood by the PG-13 rating. Jumpscares, an essential part of any horror film, were incredibly predictable and I could see them coming from a mile away, to the point where I didn’t jump even once.
A notable highlight of the film was the animatronics and pizzeria. The animatronics were very close to the iconic originals, and the location felt abandoned and foreboding. Jim Henson’s Creature Shop did a fantastic job adhering to the classic designs of Freddy, Bonnie, Chica, and Foxy and they felt weathered and worn as if they were abandoned for years. The suit performers also did a great job of making the characters feel alive.
To a fan of the original games, this movie might have been an incredible opportunity to see the iconic locations and characters come to life. But the creators wasted the incredible premise in favor of a plot weighed down by a backstory that didn’t land, formulaic scares, and a preteen-friendly rating.
